Consulting Day Rate Calculator

How to use it

1. Enter your annual income target, your working days per year (after holidays and time off), your overhead percentage, your tax percentage, and your billable percentage (the share of working days you can actually invoice). The billable percentage is the input freelancers get most wrong, because admin, sales, proposals, and downtime mean very few consultants bill anywhere near 100% of their calendar.
2. Read your required day rate, the hourly equivalent (day rate divided by eight), your monthly revenue, your annual revenue, and your effective billable days per year. The day rate is derived by grossing your target up for overhead and tax, then dividing across only the days you can actually sell, so it is the floor that lets you hit your take-home target after the business has paid for itself.
3. Use the effective billable days figure to see why your rate has to be higher than naive arithmetic suggests. At 70% utilisation across 230 working days, you only have about 161 sellable days, so your entire annual target has to be recovered across far fewer days than a salaried equivalent works. Lower utilisation pushes the required rate up fast, which is why chasing more billable days is often more valuable than raising the rate itself.
4. Compare the required rate to what your market and client tier actually pay. If the number lands 20-30% above market, the fix is usually utilisation, overhead, or positioning rather than simply quoting higher. Test a case with 10 fewer billable days or a higher overhead percentage to see how fragile your target is before you commit to it as a hard quote floor.
5. Re-run whenever your overhead, tax situation, time-off plans, or income target change, and treat the output as a minimum, not a sticker price. Pair it with the freelance tax estimator to confirm the tax percentage you used is realistic, and with the project pricing tool when a client wants a fixed quote instead of a day rate.

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More in Freelance to founder

Set rates, protect margins, and plan the transition from client work to product.

• Freelance Rate + Capacity Planner
• Project Pricing Calculator
• Freelance Tax Estimator
• Hourly to Salary Converter

Use it from code

The same calculation as a JavaScript module you can import. It runs where you import it, with no request, key or rate limit.

import { compute } from "https://aibizhub.io/engines/consulting-day-rate-calculator.js";

Input and output contract, TypeScript types and the guide for agents.